i tried not to look at her smile
because i didn’t think
it was for me but
later she said that
she looked at the pink sunlight
on my face, which
was nice and reminded me
of the time we flooded
the flat and how she laughed

“My grandma had breast cancer. Every morning and every night, she would pray for us and for others. It’s nearly fifteen years since she died, but I still feel our connection – our love. She inspires me still.”

“In the first week of September 2015, cruising through Facebook, I saw the awful pictures of children’s bodies floating in the sea – strewn on beaches and people crying out for help as they fled from war-torn lands. Like many others, I felt despair and an awful pointless voyeurism. Then, up popped a Facebook post from a woman called Moxie DePaulitte.”

‘Isabella’s Secret’ is a poem that tells the story of a working-class matriarch. She had ‘no time to sit.’ However, her journal tells a different story, and forms an unshakeable bond across generations and experience.

‘One’ is a piece taken from Cordula Marks-Venters, work in progress, illustrated novel: Beyond the Half-Dead Stream. The story follows Isa Raichenhall and Leoni Stein – an impossible couple in 1930s Bavaria.